cipfa audit conference 2013: keynote: meeting the performance challenges
TRANSCRIPT
Recognising the Performance Challenges
Gary Bandy22 May 2013
3 years as finance director
Since 2005 ...
some health work ...
more recently, policing ...
some teaching ...
and I wrote a book.
I am not going to talk about graphs of doom
“If keeping someone’s attention in a lecture was a business, it would have an 80% failure rate.”
—Dr. John Medina, Brain Rules
Adaptive problems
“The rational approach to managing organizations always competes with, and can be dominated by, continually changing, grounded, ad hoc, trial-and-error approaches—that is, by muddling through.”
—Jones and Pendlebury (2010: p28)
“Today’s problems come from yesterday’s ‘solutions’.”
—Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline
“The easy way out usually leads back in.”
“Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.”
Technical problems
Critical problems
“Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well-informed just to be undecided about them.”
—Laurence J. Peter
Adaptive problems
Tightening our belts is not going to be enough
Is it a technical or adaptive problem?
“Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins. In order to buy wins you need to buy runs.”
Competition challenges
Only one product is the cheapest. The rest compete on design.
Markets rely on failure
Public services can’t tolerate failure
The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)
“You can’t treat electricity like oranges. It’s the lifeblood of society.”
“A free market is goddam expensive to customers.”
Public value challenges
Strategic Triangle
public value aims
operational capacity
authorising environment public
manager
—Moore, Creating Public Value (1995)
operational capacity ≠ organisational capacity
organisational
operational
operational capacity ≠ organisational capacity
operational
organisational
“Financial performance is understood as the means to an end rather than an end in itself.”
—Moore, 2003
Public value scorecardMeasures of creating
public value
Org vision & missionStrategic goalsOutputs that create outcomes
Org outputsProductivityEfficiencyFinancial integrityStaff morale & capacityOrg learning & innovation
Funder relationsVolunteer relationsRelations with govt & regulatorsReputationCredibility
Measures of expanding support & authorisation
Measures of building operational capacity
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to bea good measure.”
as re-stated by Marilyn StrathernGoodhart’s Law
Accountability challenges
Accountability Triangle
manager/agent auditor
owner/principal
—Evans, 1999
“Governments try to avoid accountability to the maximum extent, that is, they try to avoid public exposure of their blunders and misdeeds and rewards to friends, because such exposure may erode public support, or at least public acquiescence, of their holding office.”
People want more transparency from their governments
Participatory Budgeting
Armchair auditors
“Information, while the essential ingredient of account-ability, alone does not ensure accountability.”
—Funnell, 2003
What might this mean for auditors?
You’ve got to produce audits from the money
you’ve got
You want to adapt and survive
© Natural History Museum
What can be done?
“problem-driven, iterative adaptation”
Auditees changing to meet their challenges will
change what you do
Objective? Extinguish fires or save lives
These save lives!
From commissioning a street cleaning service
to commissioning clean streets
Community Budgets: complex families in Little Hulton
£0
£40,000
£80,000
£120,000
£160,000
Now Future?
Welfare BenefitsPlannedReactive
So, what is the challenge?
